Rêve d’usine (Luc Decaster, 2003): presenting the vanishing workplace

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn Luc Decaster’s 2002 documentary film, Rêve d’usine, we see the factory, a workplace in crisis, gradually evaporate in front of our eyes in the last few minutes of the film. In this article, the foregrounding of the vanishing factory as a visual trope signifies a shift in a documentary practice. By the mid-2000s, the closing factory had become a commonplace in French social documentary films. Engaging what is now a lieu commun in the collective social imaginary of contemporary France, I argue that Rêve d’usine renders manifest a subjective crisis: not only are these workers dispossessed of their economic and social functions, but they face an existential disjunction. What this article highlights more specifically is that the disjunction experienced by the small group of workers can become the site of their regained agency, notwithstanding the fact that this is a deeply precarious agency. This purposeful re-presentation of the workers’ existential struggle is achieved here through the cinematic mise en abyme of their present spectrality. Adopting Jacques Derrida’s conception of the spectre, I thus propose in this article that Decaster rejects a more traditional empathetic mode of identification between spectators and the filmed subjects. It is, however, by disjoining the workers’ and the spectators’ subjective experiences that Luc Decaster opens up a space where these workers can receive justice.